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We think of our family life as very personal, but in fact it is shaped by influences well beyond our control. Families, Labour and Love identifies the ways in which family and personal life in three 'settler' societies - Australia, New Zealand and Canada - has been shaped by colonisation, immigration, globalisation, demographic changes, law and policy. Baker shows that these three countries, each a former colony, developed similar family trends and similar family policies. Strongly gendered patterns of paid and unpaid work played a major role in family life. The family practices of indigenous people were largely overlooked, as were those of recent immigrant groups. However local conditions a...
Women earn nearly half of all new PhDs in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Why, then, do they occupy a disproportionate number of the junior-level university positions while men occupy 80 percent of the more prestigious jobs? In Academic Careers and the Gender Gap, Maureen Baker draws on candid interviews with male and female scholars, previous research, and her own thirty-eight-year academic career to explain the reasons behind this inequality. She argues that current university priorities and collegial relations often magnify the impact of gendered families and identities and perpetuate the gender gap. Tracing the evolution of university priorities and practices, Baker reveals significant and persistent differences in job security, working hours, rank, salary, job satisfaction, and career length between male and female scholars.
First published in 2002. Social critics, policy makers, and the public in general frequently overlook the crucial status of women as the main recipients of welfare and as providers of paid and unpaid care. The eight original essays in this collection remedy this situation. By comparing welfare policy in advanced industrial countries and the welfare experiences of different populations of women--black or white, young and old--with that of the male experience, Sylvia Bashevkin and her contributors challenge the Moynihan report; the conservative fatherhood movement; and neoliberal philosophy, politics and practice. Women's Work is Never Done adds a new dimension to the important public discussion of women's status as citizens, disparities in welfare reform, and poverty in a globalized world.
Recent years have seen significant changes in the social policies of many liberal welfare-states; this is especially true of social programs for families with children. Increasingly, governments are making family policy trade-offs, reducing support for some families but improving it for others. Why are such trade-offs occurring, and how do governments differ in their approach to family social policy? This study addresses these questions by examining the political, demographic, and socio-economic factors influencing the restructuring of family-related programs in OECD countries. Adopting a feminist political economy approach, Maureen Baker shows that while some governments encourage their cit...
A cross-country comparison of recent Labour Party governments in New Zealand, Britain, and Australia, and an exploration of how those countries' labour movements responded to their parties' neoliberal policies in power.
Government size has attracted much scholarly attention. Political economists have considered large public expenditures a product of leftist rule and an expression of a stronger representation of labour interest. Although the size of the government has become the most important policy difference between the left and right in post-war politics, the formation of the government's funding base is also important. Junko Kato finds that the differentiation of tax revenue structure is path dependent upon the shift to regressive taxation. Since the 1980s, the institutionalisation of effective revenue raising by regressive taxes during periods of high growth has ensured resistance to welfare state backlash during budget deficits and consolidated the diversification of state funding capacity among industrial democracies. This book challenges the conventional wisdom that progressive taxation goes hand-in-hand with large public expenditures in mature welfare states and qualifies the partisan centred explanation that dominates the welfare state literature.
In the nineteenth century, Britain bestrode the world. Its domination depended in part on it exporting its social and economic problems to the farthest reaches of the globe. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, Britain’s élite thought they had found a ready-made country in which to re-establish their way of life. This invasion might ease their problems at home, and extend their influence to the edge of the earth. White settlers began to arrive in New Zealand in numbers during the 1840s, and sought to reinvent capitalism in a new land. This book traces the shape of this reinvention, and the slow emergence of New Zealand’s particular form of class structure. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the history of capitalism, and its colonial ambitions. It sheds light on the enduring nature of inequality in New Zealand, and where it might originate. Students of political science, sociology, history and cultural studies will find its arguments of interest.
Drawing on data covering the past 50 years and more than 400 interviews with top decision-makers, Wilensky provides a richly detailed account of the common problems modern governments confront and their contrasting styles of conflict resolution.
Throughout its history, Thailand has shown remarkable resiliency, adaptability, and creativity in responding to serious threats and crises, and this since much earlier times when it was known as Siam. This book, while focusing on the modern period, does reach back to ancient kingdoms but also shows the impressive rise to a modern democracy, although still endowed with a king, and even more impressively, an economic “tiger.” Moreover, it has become a prime tourist destination and is thus known to vast numbers of foreigners as a sort of “instant Asia.” The Historical Dictionary of Thailand, now in its third edition, covers this amazing story in various ways. First, the chronology trace...
In the mid 1980s government in Australia and New Zealand embraced on programmes of economic and social transformation. Here a comparison between the two countries illuminates the causes, the process and the consequences of the experiment.